Gucci’s New “Impotent” Tee Is a Challenge to Toxic Masculinity

The biggest surprise on Gucci’s fall 2020 men’s runway in Milan today wasn’t the lack of prints or the retro, boyish silhouettes, but the slogan written on the front of a simple white tee: “impotent/impatient.” The shirt was part of double-printed motif inspired by punk musician Richard Hell that also included a T-shirt that read, “thank/think.” Will men sport a top advertising impotency?

In Alessandro Michele’s new world of menswear, proclaiming oneself impotent (or impatient, for that matter) isn’t something to be ashamed of. Notes for the collection spoke of a rejection of toxic masculinity and an embrace of a genderless form of beauty. “Toxic masculinity, in fact, nourishes abuse, violence, and sexism. And not only that. It condemns men themselves to conform to an imposed phallic virility in order to be socially accepted,” read the press release. To paraphrase: The patriarchy is over.

That idea resonated throughout the collection, with shrunken knitwear and glamazon flares giving Michele’s models sinuous silhouettes that were more Aubrey Beardsley than Captain America. Of course, blurring the lines of gender—and rewriting them completely—isn’t a new idea at Michele’s Gucci. It’s something he took up at his first collection for the house five years ago. Consider this a pointed way to celebrate his fifth anniversary then, and really hammer his message about the new masculinity home.

After the show, Michele explained the inspiration for his sure-to-be controversial tee. “I always work with T-shirts because T-shirts are sort of manifestos; they were present in my teenage years, and if I want to say something, I use T-shirts,” he said. “I was looking at [Richard Hell’s] T-shirts and really thought that they were fantastic because they were overlapping words in a very bizarre way.… I was inspired to create a T-shirt with two words: impazienza (‘impatience’) and impotenza (‘powerlessness’).”